The Longest Shortest Time

We Can’t Stop: What Are You Talking About? Edition

Sasha’s latest favorite thing to say is, “What are you talking about?” Whenever I’m talking to another grownup she’ll interrupt us with the question as soon as she’s lost (usually pretty immediately). There are variations, too: What are you saying? What are you doing? What is that? What is HE saying?

I often find myself saying things like, “He’s a frog and he’s singing about how it’s hard, difficult, to be green. The color green. But there are lots of things that are green that are really cool. Like mountains, trees, the ocean. So maybe it’s not so bad to be the color green. Maybe he actually likes it.”

“Oh,” she’ll say, nodding in deep understanding.

It’s made me realize, this constant wondering of what everyone is talking about and doing must be the state of mind we’re in starting the moment we’re born. And I wonder if it is a relief for Sasha now that she has the words to ask those questions rather than just be living in bafflement all the time. Or do the questions just raise more questions? I guess that’s how we learn to be people.

In any case, I can’t help wondering if her new awareness of not knowing what is going on a lot of the time is driving the forcefulness which which she has been explaining what is going on in her books. Her books she understands. She knows them. She has a mastery of them. Often, we’ll turn to a page and she’ll push my hand out of the way and cut off my reading with an abrupt no! “No! ” she’ll shout. “That’s a cat and that’s a cat and that’s a cat and that’s a cat.” (On the page in The Cat at Night where all the cats are partying on rooftops.) Or “No! You have to put both hands up!” (In This Plus That, when the girls are showing the gesture for maybe.) We CAN NOT continue until I have acknowledged that, yes, those are all cats, or, yes, my hands are up. Both! Both are up!

Maybe this desire to be in control of knowing is also part of the reason that Sasha adamantly resists new books. That said, most of our We Can’t Stop Reading list this week are ones I have mentioned before.

Most notably, we have returned to Julia Donaldson’s The Snail and the Whale, a recommendation by LST reader Emily George. Snail has been back at the library for a few months but Sasha was asking for it recently, so I got it back out and she can barely read anything else. (On the last page, when the snails all climb on the snail, I get a lot of: “That’s a snail and that’s a snail and that’s a snail . . .”

Next up is Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen. You may remember Klassen’s name from I Want My Hat Back. The page Sasha makes me stop on in Yarn is the page that features all of the animals that Anabelle knits sweaters for, including a bear and a rabbit that look suspiciously like the bear and rabbit nemeses from Hat. She insists on going and getting Hat and holding it out in front of Yarn, proving that these are the same animals.

As I mentioned, This Plus That and The Cat at Night are still frequent requests.

And then there’s a curious one.

Mustache!, another by Mac Barnett, is a book that Sasha does not want me to read to her. Yet she will not go to sleep without it in her crib. Since she won’t let me read it to her, I can’t really say why she feels this attachment. Perhaps it’s because the cover under the dust jacket is mustache-less?

If only I could get as good an answer when I ask her, “What are you thinking?” as she gets when she asks, “What are you talking about?”

How about you? What are you and your children talking (and reading) about?